The Bookworm Beat 10-27-15 — “it’s just another day” edition and open thread

I’ve been going through my emails, with 200 down, 300 or so yet to go. Even though I’m only less than halfway through, I’ve discovered marvelous articles hiding in my email box thanks to friends from all over.

Did Merkel unilaterally doom Europe?

We no longer subscribe to the great man or great woman school of history. We’ve also abandoned the notion of high tragedy arising from the hubris of said great men or women. Perhaps, though, it’s time for us to revive that genre.

Daniel Greenfield convincingly argues that Germany’s Angela Merkel, with her mad plan to replace her country’s shrinking, aging population with Muslim refugees, will have single-handedly done to Europe what generations of Muslim conquerors have tried to do, which is to turn it into a part of the global Caliphate:

Merkel may have already doomed Germany. The Bild newspaper published a leaked secret government document estimating that the number of migrants invading Europe this year might reach 1.5 million.

And that bad news gets much worse because the document estimates that each migrant will bring in as many as eight family members once they’re settled in, bringing the year’s true total to 7.36 million.

That’s almost 10 percent of the population of Germany. In just one invasion.

And the migrants are mostly young men entering a rapidly aging country whose young male population is under 5 million. Germany’s Muslim population already approaches 5 million. The median age of Germany’s Muslim population is 34, while the median age for the overall population is 46.

Merkel has rapidly sped up the rate at which Germany’s young male population becomes Muslim. (Emphasis added.)

Where Muslims come in, Jews go out

If you have a quiet hour, you can watch Pierre Rehov’s Silent Exodus, about the Muslims’ ongoing war against the Jews, one that goes back to Islam’s inception. Muslims don’t hate Jews because of Israel’s founding. Muslims hate Jews because of Mohamed’s teachings.

True to form, France tries to destroy Jews

Those familiar with French history never make the mistake of thinking that the French are philosemitic. Napoleon may have broken Europe’s Jews out of the medieval ghettos in which they were confined, but from the Middle Ages, to the Dreyfus Affair, to the Vichy government, to the Mohammed al-Dura fraud, to the slaughter at the Hyper Cacher, France has been either cavalier about or actively hostile to its Jewish population.

Caroline Glick points out that, even now, with French Jews experiencing the Muslims’ murderous rage, the French government makes a lot of sound and fury, but delivers nothing:

In the nine months since the attacks, rather than go after the Islamic communities of France that infect their members with Nazi-like Jew hatred marinated in Koranic dispensations for murder, French authorities have forced French Jewry to live under lock and key. Jewish communal institutions are required to shoulder astronomical security costs as their buildings have come to look more like military garrisons than elementary schools and synagogues.

France, which has up until now had the largest Muslim population in Europe (Germany will soon overtake it), has long known which crocodile to appease — and it’s the one clogging the streets five times a day to pray to Mecca. Small wonder, then, that as Glick also demonstrates, France is playing a long, deep game to destroy Israel. It’s latest ploy is to is try to end Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount:

Contrary to what the French government would have us believe, France’s Temple Mount gambit is not an effort to quell the violence. French protestations of concern over the loss of life in the current tempest of Palestinian terrorism ring hollow.

France doesn’t really oppose Palestinian terrorism.

To the contrary, it facilitates it.

Every year, the French government pays millions of euros, dollars and shekels to Palestinian NGOs whose stated goal is to destroy Israel. Through its NGO agents, France finances the radicalization of Palestinian society. This French-financed radicalization makes Palestinian terrorism inevitable.

I know that there exist nice French people but, as a whole, I do not find the French a nice people.

Lois Lerner exemplifies the Obama administration’s lawlessness

Lefties love to post on Facebook a statement to the effect that the Obama administration is the most scandal-free administration ever! It doesn’t seem to occur to them that when your Attorney General refuses to prosecute manifest crimes and the nation’s major newspapers refuses to hold the government accountable for that refusal, this inaction doesn’t mean your administration is scandal-free. It simply means it’s lawless, which is, without exaggeration, the first step to tyranny.

The rule of law is, after all, one of the common people’s bulwarks against tyranny. When there’s one law for the powerful and another law for everyone else, freedom has left the nation.

IBD also points out that, when one administration thinks itself clever to sidestep the law, any subsequent administration will do precisely the same:

Lerner was caught red-handed targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups, wrote partisan emails to prove it, then engaged in a massive cover-up effort — with a suspiciously crashed server, an oddly missing BlackBerry and plenty of excuses.

She evaded even more accountability by shielding herself with the Fifth Amendment in Congress. The consequences to her have been . .. retirement on a full pension with all her bonuses to a multimillion-dollar mansion in the deep D.C. suburbs.

As for her victims — and they were many — there is no justice. Now everyone, no matter what their political leanings, will wonder if they too are a political target by an out-of-control agency protected by the Justice Department.

Because that’s the real consequence of this failure to hold Lerner accountable: A precedent has been set.

IRS officials now know they can go after any political opponent they want, ruin them any way they wish, swing an election — as occurred with Lerner’s actions — and get away with it.

I was shocked and delighted to read that Republicans, rather than flopping backwards and moaning “What can we do? We’re helpless,” are actually doing something: They are taking steps to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, on the grounds that he misled the public and destroyed documents that were sought under a congressional subpoena. Perhaps this strong Congressional action will signal that, even if the AG is in cahoots with the administration, justice can still be served.

Different takes on Hillary’s testimony

I have been having an interesting, frustrating, depressing debate on Facebook with a Hillary supporter. One of my readers was kind enough to link to the post my friend wrote about the Hillary hearings. One of her friends, in turn, an arch-Progressive, complained that the post was mean and that the entire day of testimony was just a way for bullying right wing men to gang up on and try to intimidate a well-intentioned, entirely innocent Progressive woman.

In response, I pointed out that Hillary’s own testimony revealed that she was a liar, as demonstrated by the fact that she told her daughter and the Egyptian ambassador an entirely different story from the one she tried to sell to the American public. Hillary’s testimony also raised questions about her competence. After all, one of her primary responsibilities as Secretary of State was to ensure the safety of the people who served under her in American outposts all over the world. Despite this primary job requirement, she managed to miss 600 emails warning that the Benghazi facility was dangerously unsecured.

Finally, I suggested that Hillary might be a sociopath, which was the only way I could explain the fact that, when she finally read one of the emails from Amb. Christopher Stevens begging for better security, she giggled and said that he always had a great sense of humor. I wonder if Stevens was laughing when the terrorists about whom he had warned Hillary slaughtered him.

The Progressive woman’s response was that no one had ever proved a thing against Hillary regarding Whitewater. So there. She’s innocent and Republican men are picking on her because she’s female.

I told the woman that I wasn’t challenging her version of Hillary’s history but was just focusing on what came out of the testimony before the House. Based on that testimony, I asked her, as a general principle, if she is willing to vote for a candidate with whom she agrees, regardless of unsavory things such as dishonesty and incompetence.

The woman never said “I refuse to answer.” Instead, she simply didn’t answer. Instead, she incessantly repeated that Hillary was innocent in Whitewater and that misogyny is at work here. Frankly, it was creepy. The woman had a programmed response and absolutely nothing shook it.

I mention this distressing interlude (which I drew out at greater length than usual just to see if anything would interrupt her shtick) because neo-neocon also commented upon the Democrats’ unwillingness to look at the substance of what Hillary said, preferring instead to give her style points for being calm and even laughing under the onslaught of those misogynistic white men in the House:

Sure enough, on the Yahoo page that comes up when I go to check my email, the featured story was advertised with a photo of Hillary Clinton and a headline and blurb that went like this:

“Benghazi panel gives Clinton presidential platform”

The 11-hour hearing yields precious little new information and no major political missteps by the Democratic front-runner.

If I was the person (in terms of politics) I’d been until fourteen or so years ago, I’d most likely have scanned that headline and figured it meant that Hillary had done well, had done nothing wrong, there was nothing new, all was okay, and that I didn’t have to read any further. All I needed to know was contained there: nothing more to see, move right along. And I’d have been only too happy to have done so, because hearings are boring and there’s lots of better things to do. Multiply that by many, many, many millions.

Watergate was different, neo-neocon adds, not just because televised hearings were still something new, but because a single man, disliked even by his own party (which still managed to admire him), was on trial before the nation. Moreover, the nation’s Democrat-leaning media was eager to see him hang, so they made much of the hearings. This time around, it’s the Democrat party itself in the dock, and neither the media nor the Democrats are inclined either to watch the spectacle or to encourage others to watch and learn.

Hillary wants your gun

I was joking with a friend today that someone ought to invent a game called “Six Degrees of Hillary Clinton,” kind of like “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The latter, if you’re not familiar with it, says that you can name anyone in Hollywood and, in fewer than six steps, make a connection between that person and Kevin Bacon. For example, Ian McKellen was in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) with Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. McAvoy and Fassbender, in turn, were in X-Men: First Class (2011) with Kevin Bacon. Therefore Ian McKellen is separated by two degrees from Kevin Bacon.

With Hillary, the game would be to discover that, at one time or another, everyone in America has held a political view in common with Hillary’s political views. The secret to this trick, of course, is that Hillary will say anything in order to advance herself. She’s against gay marriage, then she’s for gay marriage; she’s for invading Iraq, until she’s against invading Iraq; and she’s not a stand-by-your-man cookie-baking mom right up until she is.

On gun rights, though, Hillary’s always been anti-Second Amendment. The only difference now is that she’s even more vocally anti-Second Amendment than ever before. Bernie Sanders may be the most socialist candidate running for President, but damn if she can’t outflank him on the gun issue.

Mike McDaniel, one of my favorite all-around bloggers, and one of the best gun bloggers on the internet, looks at Hillary’s fervent allegiance to the goal of grabbing your gun, so that only she and other important people in government benefit from the protections a gun bestows:

Hillary Clinton has been reasonably consistent over her long career of attaining titles but accomplishing virtually nothing in one thing: her absolute fidelity to gun control. Clinton can be counted upon to flip flop, evade, obscure, stonewall, lie, dissemble and say anything necessary at any time to any audience–even adding the occasional, horrendously bad black and/or southern accent–to achieve her political goals, but she has never heard of an anti-gun/anti-freedom idea she didn’t embrace. If so, I’ve yet to find an example of it, and I’ve been paying attention since Hillary first stepped foot in the White House–and left it, “dead broke,” taking much of the furniture and silverware with her.

Since the abject failure of the Clinton gun ban–enacted in 1994 and sunset in 2004, and the subsequent horrific losses of Democrat congressional seats, most Democrats have been careful to avoid any overt mention of the issue. They’ve even broken the usual Democrat rule of swinging wildly to the left in primaries and back to the center in general elections where guns are concerned, unless they are one of the Congressmen or Senators in an absolutely safe, rabidly anti-gun district/state. Fortunately, they have been relatively few.

Hillary, however, is different. In swinging to the left of Socialist Bernie Sanders, she is not saying anything about the Second Amendment that she hasn’t already embraced, at least in spirit.

Robert Heinlein on patriotism

I think that I shall have to read Heinlein’s entire Vietnam era speech about the virtues of patriotism. The snippet at The Moral Christian made me hungry for more. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s a snippet of the snippet:

Patriotism is as necessary a part of man’s evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual. A man who is NOT patriotic is an evolutionary dead end. This is not sentiment but the hardest of logic.

Why soldiers win and lose

There is probably no higher expression of patriotism than the willingness to serve in your nation’s military. I serve my nation sitting in my warm little office in front of a computer, trying to convince a handful of Marin liberals that they’re wrong. A soldier goes bodily into action, willing to put his blood on his life on the line to defend his county. I therefore found fascinating a post David Foster did about organizational culture, based upon a Spaniard’s observations in 1797 about the British military.

David Foster looked at British unit cohesion as noted back in the late 18th century, and drew from it a larger point about what makes a functional organization. I’ll just seize on one line from the post: “An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.”

This British military doctrine goes back a long, long time. Indeed, one can see it in the miraculous victory the British had at the Battle of Agincourt, which was fought on October 25, 1415. Bernard Cornwall (a marvelous writer) has penned a vivid homage to the British troops who fought that long ago battle — troops who were not the flowers of noble chivalry, which was the case with the defeated French, but were instead the ordinary men of England, fighting for their nation and for each other.

It seems to me that we still have that spirit here in our American military. The question is whether this military can survive Obama’s relentless press to weaken, feminize, and sensitize the troops in order to re-make our military as a giant Leftist social experiment, leaving it filled with troops incapable of defending either each other or their nation.

Public service announcement about fake news websites

Because the Left is remarkably forgiving of its own factual errors and focuses like a laser with a siren attached on any factual errors emanating from anyone who isn’t a card-carrying Progressive. One of the ways to coax conservatives into these errors, which can then be held up to show that conservatives are both crazy and fact-challenged, is through sites that pretend to be conservative but actually exist to pass on false narratives.

Zionists 4 Trump has done the conservative internet a great service by highlighting this problem and warning against some of those sites. I have a warning of my own, though, about the list of sites: By using the word “fake” to describe the sites, it indiscriminately mixes up genuine satire sites, click bait sites that nevertheless relay real news, and false flag sites that are genuinely intended to trip people up.

For example, DuffleBlog is my favorite milblog satire site. It’s not intended to be “fake news.” It’s intended to be satire, and does a damn fine job too. On the site, though, it’s unclear that it’s not a malicious site, but is for entertainment purposes only. (Although honestly, if you check out DuffleBlog and think the stories are real, you might be too credulous for your own good.)

Anyway, check out the list and remember that, while not all the sites named are malicious in nature, everything on them should be cross-checked.